Field notes
Practitioner essays on building production software with AI agents.
Operator-grade reports on the systems, decisions, and economics of shipping software with AI — what worked, what failed, and what changed.
Articles
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Why FDE Works: The Same Reason Consultants Work
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The irony is familiar: you debate a $400 model bill, approve a $180,000 SOW, and pay an outsider to say what your own engineers already told you.
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The Use Case Is Building Software and the Best Practice Is Today
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Stop asking about AI use cases. The use case is your entire SDLC. Learn why executives must build with AI tools themselves to lead the transformation.
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You Cannot Read Yourself Into AI-SDLC Literacy
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Reading about AI won’t make you AI-literate. Only hands-on building will develop the intuition you need to lead. Start tonight.
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The AI Soft Ban Assessment
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗A browser-only scoring assessment for whether your company has quietly soft-banned AI in the SDLC while still calling itself AI friendly.
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I Want You Software Developers to Be Unhappy (Keep Reading, It’s Not What You Think It Is)
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗The AI Engineer is a new job family, and it is the future of this profession. The "software developer" as the role has been defined for fifteen years is going through what farmers went through with the tractor. If you are still doing the old job and you are not unhappy, you have not been paying attention.
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Your Engineering Team Ships in 28 Days. Ten of Those Days Are Work. The Other Eighteen Are a Leadership Problem.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your engineering team reports a 30% velocity improvement from AI tooling. Your CFO sees 5% on the P&L. The gap, millions per year, is sitting in your value stream, visible to anyone who picks up a marker. A whiteboard and a Tuesday afternoon will show you exactly where the money goes.
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What Got You Here Won’t Keep You Here: A Letter to Technology Executives
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Technology executives: the skills that got you here won’t keep you here. A frank letter about adapting your leadership for the AI-native era.
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The 2028 Problem You’re Creating in 2025
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Your 2025 AI decisions shape your 2028 reality. Learn why waiting for clarity is the riskiest strategy and how to build for capabilities that don’t exist yet.
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Dear CISO — Your Job Is Not to Stop AI. Your Job Is to Make It Safe to Ship.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗If your answer to AI is “no” until further notice, you are not reducing risk. You are pushing it into the shadows while your competitors learn to ship faster with guardrails you should have built.
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Two Engineers. One Year. More Output Than Ten.
Executive Deck ↗Exec summary ↗Listen ↗Nathan joined a scale-up as CTO with a mandate to hire ten engineers. He hired zero. Twelve months later, he and one existing associate engineer had decomposed the monolith, automated deployments, and outshipped the original plan.
Corporate fiction
Three books. One operating problem. No clean hero.
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